Do You Know Where His Keys Are?

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Do You Know Where His Keys Are?

Some people make lists of their books or CDs. Some people take pictures of their possessions for insurance purposes.

Matthew McClintock, a 35-year-old webmaster from Chicago, makes lists and takes pictures to an obsessive degree.

McClintock has created a website that attempts to document everything in his house, from the boxers in his dresser to the tools in the basement, and absolutely everything else in between.

Since last October, McClintock has carefully gone around his three-story house photographing and documenting everything it contains, including cooking utensils, books, T-shirts, and pens in a desk drawer.

He has taken digital pictures of each item, down to the lone chopstick in the kitchen junk drawer – and written a short description of each: more than 2,000 objects in all.

"I really like lists and documentation and that kind of thing," McClintock said by phone from his job at Columbia College. "I tend to make a lot of lists of things: things I own, things I've done. I love the Palm Pilot. I have a database of all the people at the college and all the classes, which is useless because I don't take any (classes). But there is something very comforting in having that kind of structured information."

McClintock's site is cleverly designed to make it easy to wander the house, rifling through drawers and cupboards. The site is divided into floors, then rooms, followed by furniture, drawers and their contents. Each piece of furniture is represented by a deco-style line drawing, and the contents have been digitally photographed.

McClintock estimates he has documented 70 percent of the house's contents. Most of what he hasn't documented is packed in boxes in the basement.

"I keep finding bits and pieces – a dresser drawer, a wastebasket, some silverware, that kind of thing," he said.

The only places McClintock hasn't documented are his live-in girlfriend's closet and a room she uses.

His girlfriend compared the project to "Kraftwerk meets Charlie Brown." McClintock said he's not sure but thinks she's referring to the order and technological precision of Kraftwerk's music and the intimate, chatty homeyness of the Peanuts character.

"At first she thought it was pretty stupid but now she finds it pretty interesting," he said. "She's an artist. She gets obsessive. She likes building things, so she's tolerant of it."

As someone on Metafilter noted, McClintock is a serious neat freak.

"I like to put stuff away," he said. "I like to organize things."

One drawer of a tall bureau, containing an assortment of odds and ends, has been carefully documented with a schematic, like a photo shoot of a sports team. McClintock didn't have to tidy the drawer for the picture. That is how the drawer actually is, he said.

McClintock didn't publicize the site and it had very little traffic until it was discovered on Wednesday by Metafilter, a community weblog frequented by a lot of designers and artists.

Immediately, people started asking if McClintock had a stash of porn. A search was launched. It didn't take long for someone to find a collection of erotica. But to people's surprise, they weren't hidden under the mattress or the bottom of a drawer: they were found on a bookcase in the study.

Shortly afterwards, someone else was rummaging through a drawer marked "taxes" and found the real stuff: a collection of racy postcards from the 1930s.

"I wasn't surprised that people would hunt out the most personal or salacious items," McClintock said. "But there are little nuggets of personal items that people haven't found yet. It's interesting what people pick out. What people look for tells you a lot about them."

McClintock said he started the project while learning how to set up and configure the Apache Web server. He wanted to see if he could structure a site to reflect the structure of his house.

The site was created on McClintock's Macintosh using Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver. It's served off a Linux box in the basement.

"Using a Mac for a server is like using sirloin steak for compost," he said. "I'll leave that to a cheap Linux box."

When things are moved around in the house, McClintock adjusts their location online. He is thinking of somehow hooking the refrigerator to the Peapod online grocery store so that he could document what he was eating "if I get really obsessive."